APPENDIX 323 



enthusiast, who feels himself aggrieved if not sup- 

 plied with infinity itself, wherein to carry on the 

 processes of his science. Seriously however, the 

 necessity for indefinitely protracted time does not 

 arise from the facts, but from the attempt to ex- 

 plain the facts without any adequate cause, and to 

 appeal to an infinite series of chance interactions 

 apart from a designed plan, and without regard to 

 the consideration, that we know of no way in which, 

 with any conceivable amount of time, the first 

 living and organized beings could be spontaneously 

 produced from dead matter. It is this last difficulty 

 which really blocks the way, and leads to the wish 

 to protract indefinitely an imaginary process, which 

 must end at last in an insuperable difficulty. 



Were Evolutionists content to require a reason- 

 able time for the development of life, and to assign 

 this to an adequate cause, they might see in the 

 reduction of living things in the pre-Cambrian ages 

 to few and generalized or synthetic types, evidence 

 of an actual approach to the beginnings of life, and 

 beyond this to a condition of the earth in which 

 life would be impossible. 



